I ♥ Ann Coulter

In her latest column, the grand diva of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy puts her finger right on how liberalism is cowardice masquerading as morality and sobriety (or in its Catholic versions, cowardice¹ masquerading as piety).

My favorite Coulter line is:

But according to Dean, the Democrats would have the "moral authority that Bill Clinton had" – no wait! keep reading – "when he brought together the Israelis and Palestinians." Clinton really brokered a Peace in Our Time with that deal – "our time" being a reference to that five-minute span during which he announced it. Yasser Arafat immediately backed out on all his promises and launched the second intifada.

Does Dean have any sense of history, is everything about domestic politics? What is he babbling about? "Bringing people together" is not a good thing when one side sees it as a short-term strategy to facilitate the long-term extermination of the other. But because Clinton was so concerned with his 1999-2000 "Legacy Tour" -- which included the Camp David meetings between Barak and Arafat, the collapse of which triggered the second Intafada -- we never even thought to ask himself whether the situation was ripe for peace. It was all about "bringing people together" considered as a per se good or an end in itself. Thankfully, the current Israeli and American governments are not under such illusions and know the prospects for peace and security are directly correlated to the height of the Hamas and Hezbollah funeral pyres. As Sam Peckinpah might put it: Bring Me the Head of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

There are only two choices with savages: fight or run. Democrats always want to run, but they dress it up in meaningless catchphrases like "diplomacy," "detente," "engagement," "multilateral engagement," "multilateral diplomacy," "containment" and "going to the U.N." ...

Democrats like to talk tough, but you can never trap them into fighting. There is always an obscure objection to be raised in this particular instance – but in some future war they would be intrepid! One simply can't imagine what that war would be.

My favorite example of liberal perfidy on this point was their talking point for years during the 1990s that the cat-and-mouse game with Saddam Hussein (plus the crippling effects of a decade of sanctions) was all the fault of George Bush (41) for not "finishing the job" against Saddam by leaving him in power after Kuwait (Republicans made similar arguments too). I specifically remember Mario Cuomo saying "George Bush wouldn't finish the fight he started. I would."

But as Coulter points out, with liberals, there is never enough evidence to actually start a fight. She points out Biden ... there's not enough evidence that Iran has nukes, so we can't go to war; North Korea has nukes, so we can't go to war. The one exception unnoted by Coulter is that if it to their political advantage that there be enough evidence, there will always be enough evidence. They bitch about going to war against Iraq based on "uncertain intelligence" (that phrase being a redundant construction, BTW) about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. That will stick in the craws of those of us who remember their (post hoc, of course) complaints about the behavior of law enforcement and intelligence prior to September 11 how law enforcement "failed to connect the dots" and all that. "Connecting the dots" is of course, merely another way of saying "conjecturing" and "guessing." Such conjectures and guesses will, of course, turn out to be right some of the time, but some of the time, they will not. (This is why they're called "guesses.") If they're not ... then Bushitleretardespot cooked the books and substituted professional judgement and leaned on subordinates and all the rest of that narrative.

Comparing pre-9/11 and pre-Iraq war is unfair in one respect -- there is no way we would have gone to war had we been able to roll up the 9/11 conspirators by connecting the dots (or by not handing out to young Arab males U.S. entry visas as if they were beads at Mardi Gras). One would at least think that arresting the 19 (or 20) hijackers would have been a good start. But when it comes time to actually arrest people in the present tense, rather than with 20/20 hindsight, liberals worry more about the things that really matter to them -- namely avoiding racial profiling.

When the gang of domestic Jihadis plotting to bring down the Sears Tower was arrested, we got the complaint that this gang didn't look like America, and so was really Willie Horton ×7 cooked up by Karl Rove. I am not kidding. Had the FBI rolled up Atta et al, we would have heard the same crap.

Liberals would have noticed that this "alleged Al Qaeda cell" were all Arabs and all Muslims and demanded to know why Arabs and Muslims were being singled out, like how Bill Clinton got all indignant and tried to play the race card to insulate himself from Chinagate². We would have heard how McVeigh and Nichols were white and how "Jihad" is a concept of colonialist Orientalism (Edward Said would have assured us). Frank Rich would have declared as fact that the 19 could have been scapegoated for "flying while Arab" or "flight-training while Arab," which, he would have pompously noted, is not a crime. Larry King would have had some United pilot named Ahmed on to discuss how patriotic he is. And the left-radicals among them would have come out and said "this isn't about terrorism at all but about stirring the long simmering pot of American racism that is only more spicy now due to a growing anger and a need for traditional scapegoats." The neocons and the Israel lobby would have found a way into the narrative.

Heads I win, tails you lose. Liberalism is literally the philosophy of snivelling infants.
-------------------------------------------------------------
¹ And in a couple of cases, outright anti-Semitism.
² Inexplicably, in a story about China seeking to purchase influence in the Clinton administration, the dramatis personae included a lot of Huangs and Chungs, with a supporting cast of thousands of Buddhist monks. Whooda thunk it.